Editing Acrozatarim/Gazetteer (section)

==Shatter==

Smallest of the White Bay's city-states, Shatter was once Shamur, a port less than half a league from the settlement's current location.  Shamur suffered catastrophe when the lesser Elder God Tervinzarak was metaphysically mortally wounded during a battle on its Chariot; said Chariot ended up crashing into the coast, causing tidal waves and reducing Shamur into a pile of mud and rubble that spilled into the Bay.  The Shatter of today is built on and around the crippled hulk of the Chariot and the remnants of its former pilot.

The Chariot itself sticks out from the shore at an uneven angle.  Where it meets and punches through the cliffs, more conventional buildings spread and sprawl away from it, but the bulk of the city is a rather ramshackle array of structures that cover the warped surface of the Chariot's deck, spill out from the great rents that tore its flanks apart, stack level after level of abodes within the creaking spars and girders of its innards and climb the sides of the immense smokestacks and towers that rise from its top.  Where the hulk's carcass hits the water and begins to sink, innumerable pontoons and piers spread out to form a floating harbour.

Shatter is not generally a place of the rich or the wealthy.  Even now, there are those who fear the consequences of dwelling in and on an Elder's personal sea-throne and who keep clear of the city; most of those who dwell here were once, perhaps generations ago, of refugee or outcast origin.  But the centuries have brought strength and tradition to the city, and the Chariot has still not collapsed under the parasitic weight of the shanties and shambles that encrust it like barnacles.  Still, the innards of Shatter are not a place for the faint-hearted; quite apart from the claustrophobic nature of the dwellings crammed amongst bulkheads and insane pieces of architecture, there remain ancient eldritch guts to the thing that have never been safely disassembled or removed, and occasionally lumps of engine or metaphysical manipulation devices sputter and spark with brief but devastating energies.

Shatter is ruled by a semi-demarchy; a single Prince is elected every decade by a randomly selected committee from amongst the city council, itself made of men and women who captain a vessel, own property of at least a certain value or who have bought their position with an appropriate donation to the city.  After nine years, the elderly Prince Urthane is coming to the end of his service, and new elections will soon stir the deck-gangs of Shatter into their most beloved past-time - politics and campaigning.  As well as the Princedom, any number of lesser political seats are also elected by a random lottery of people from the common population.

Shatter was, of course, heavily looted and scavenged soon after the Dawn War ended, but a bizarre piece of machinery that was not taken before the city established itself was the Organist Painter, a large device the size of a factory that appears as an assemblage of spidery bronze limbs, immense fluting pipes and gurgling vats.  It may originally have been some sort of life support for the Elder God pilot, but now it's been repurposed to printing, painting and dye processing.  As such, Shatter is a brilliantly colourful place, a myriad mess of colours, and during election campaigns (and there are many) the Organist is turned to a frenzy of often ridiculous and absurd propaganda-printing.  It is technically illegal to repaint or poster the carcass of Tervinzarak, but a particularly notable election campaign for a Prince eighty years ago had the dead, preserved god-horror dressed up in an immense paper image of the Prince's chief political rival.  This is fondly remembered by the populace as one of their greatest moments of creativity, even though it resulted in the Lady of Grim Mercy's outraged priesthood having the Prince tried and executed for such desecration.

Amidst the usual riot of shrines and temples clinging to the rusting hulk's flanks, the most powerful cult in Shatter is that of Churaphrat.  The famous priestess Mailu Tien established the temple before Shatter was even truly inhabited, and today it forms a partial covering around the immense, withered husk of Tervinzarak that still squats in its seat atop the Chariot, great snaking cables and tubes puncturing its warped meat to tie it into its steed.  Even just looking at the lesser Elder's corpse for too long causes headaches, meaning that top-deck-walking Shatterites have a habit of keeping their gazes low.  The temple is a monument to Churaphrat, a cold declaration that even Elders cannot match her cold grasp.  Cult practices are rumoured to include chipping at the thing's calcerous talon-hairs and grinding at its elephantine skin to produce substances that are then ground and processed to form sinister drugs and poisons. Of course, even just the corpse of an Elder is a dangerous, reality-warping thing, and the temple has had to be rebuilt three times.